About Me

Recovering academic, blogger-back-from-the-dead, and one-year veteran of the workforce. Now an organizational embed, with lessons learned from the trenches and stories to tell. All with a not-so-slightly academic twist.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Sunday Poet: Howard Nemerov

I know it is generally supposed to be a Saturday Poet series. Times are busy.

But there is always time for poetry.

I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee

I tell you that I see her stillAt the dark entrance of the hall.One gas lamp burning near her shoulderShone also from her other sideWhere hung the long inaccurate glassWhose pictures were as troubled water.An immense shadow had its handBetween us on the floor, and seemedTo hump the knuckles nervously,A giant crab readying to walk,Or a blanket moving in its sleep.

You will remember, with a smileInstructed by movies to reminisce,How strict her corsets must have been,How the huge arrangements of her hairWould certainly betray the leastImpassionate displacement there.It was no rig for dallying,And maybe only marriage couldDerange that queenly scaffolding—As when a great ship, coming home,Coasts in the harbor, dropping sailAnd loosing all the tackle that had lacedHer in the long lanes ....

I know

We need not draw this figure out.But all that whalebone came from whales.And all the whales lived in the sea,In calm beneath the troubled glass,Until the needle drew their blood.I see her standing in the hall,Where the mirror’s lashed to blood and foam,And the black flukes of agonyBeat at the air till the light blows out.

Writing

The cursive crawl, the squared-off charactersthese by themselves delight, even withouta meaning, in a foreign language, inChinese, for instance, or when skaters curveall day across the lake, scoring their whiterecords in ice. Being intelligible,these winding ways with their audacitiesand delicate hesitations, they becomemiraculous, so intimately, out thereat the pen’s point or brush’s tip, do worldand spirit wed. The small bones of the wristbalance against great skeletons of starsexactly; the blind bat surveys his wayby echo alone. Still, the point of styleis character. The universe inducesa different tremor in every hand, from thecheck-forger’s to that of the EmperorHui Tsung, who called his own calligraphythe ‘Slender Gold.’ A nervous manwrites nervously of a nervous world, and so on.

Miraculous. It is as though the worldwere a great writing. Having said so much,let us allow there is more to the worldthan writing: continental faults are notbare convoluted fissures in the brain.Not only must the skaters soon go home;also the hard inscription of their skatesis scored across the open water, which longremembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.

Young Woman

Naked before the glass she said,“I see my body as no man has,Nor any shall unless I wedAnd naked in a stranger’s houseStand timid beside his bed.There is no pity in the flesh.”

“Or else I shall grow old,” she said,“Alone, and change my likelinessFor a vile, slack shape, a headShriveled with thinking wickednessAgainst the day I must be deadAnd eaten by my crabbed wish.”

“One or the other way,” she said,“How shall I know the difference,When wrinkles come, to spinster or bride?Whether to marry or burn is bless-ed best, O stranger to my bed,There is no pity in the flesh.”

Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzleThat while you watched turned into pieces of snowRiding a gradient invisibleFrom silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

A Spell before Winter

After the red leaf and the gold have gone,Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rainBruised and discolored, when October's flameGoes blue to guttering in the cusp, this landSinks deeper into silence, darker into shade.There is a knowledge in the look of things,The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

Now I can see certain simplicitiesIn the darkening rust and tarnish of the time,And say over the certain simplicities,The running water and the standing stone,The yellow haze of the willow and the blackSmoke of the elm, the silver, silent lightWhere suddenly, readying toward nightfall,The sumac's candelabrum darkly flames.And I speak to you now with the land's voice,It is the cold, wild land that says to youA knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.